“We firmly believe that a combination of new technologies and renewable energy sources will best meet current environmental, economic, and societal challenges,” says Benjamin David. He also points out that solar power increases the on-board battery life by a factor of 3.

 

Just like a satellite, SolarXOne is packed with technologies. Half airplane, half drone, this UAV weighs 25 kg, has a 4.50 m wingspan, and is innovative in several ways:

• Easy to use: SolarXOne is as easy to operate as a drone, but with the high-performance of an aircraft.
• Fast deployment: Ready to fly in 30 minutes.
• Range: 12 hours of non-stop flight.
• Silent: As the drone is fully-electric, it flies without making any noise.
• Excellent handling: This is due to its aerodynamic configuration combined with the technical choices implemented.
• Reliable: Back-up systems to ensure a high-degree of reliability for users.
• Low-maintenance: All-electric devices require little maintenance.
• Ability to fly day or night: On-board batteries that are charged by solar power.
• Exceptional payload capacity: Gyroscopes, high-performance cameras, thermal imaging cameras, LIDAR, etc.: SolarXOne can carry up to 5 kg of payload, including the latest communication and safety technologies.
• A system compliant with aeronautical standards: This means the UAV can be certified to the highest level and easily obtain flight authorization worldwide.

A wide range of applications

SolarXOne, with a daily flight range of 600 km, can fly over thousands of acres, producing image resolution of cm accuracy. Consequently many sectors are interested in the drone for a wide variety of missions:

• Mapping and topography of large areas on land or at sea, such as nature reserves,
• Very high-resolution photographic surveys for large-scale linear infrastructure (pipelines, electricity lines, roads, rivers, etc.),
• Photographic surveys for precision agriculture, in the context of forest mapping, for example,
• Monitoring and inspection missions.

XSun markets its drone, but also offers SolarXOne services via its operations team. The team flies the drone on behalf of clients who just want to collect data.

"maxon is definitely the best"

Efficiency, quality, reliability, and durability. Those were the guiding principles of the SolarXOne design. “Because of the fully electric design, we had to strive for cost and energy efficiency in every assembly. This is why it was essential to work only with the best, and that means maxon for the propulsion system,” says the founder of XSun. For propulsion, the challenge was to find the most reliable, highest performance, and smallest systems possible, with virtually the same requirements as in the aerospace sector. “In those three areas, maxon is definitely the best. There are very good reasons why they supply NASA with its robot motors! We were delighted to see maxon enter the drone market, and our collaboration was set up very quickly,” adds Benjamin David.

Every aspect of the technology had to be pushed right to the limit for the drone to be able to fly completely independently for over 12 hours. XSun took advantage of maxon's expertise in the following three areas:

• Controller
• Motor
• Propulsion

Ever since they met at the Paris Air Show in 2019, the maxon and XSun teams have been working in close collaboration. In July 2020, for its first long-range solar flight, the SolarXOne succeeded in flying silently for 12 hours without any CO2 emissions, and completely independently. Since then, it has completed operational assignments for various clients in France and other parts of Europe.